Let me start by saying that I think USATF should pay the pros way more. I think largely the entire Nike payment to Nike should go to athletes because they are paying for those singlets.
That being said, I think Nick's understanding of economics and business is a little lacking.
NIck has made a number of tweets along these lines.
Back in March, he tweeted, "If the IOC shared 50% of its 4 billion 2016 revenue with the athletes it would write a $190,000 check to every single Rio Olympian. #Rio2016"
https://twitter.com/NickSymmonds/status/715006463974871040
What Nick fails to account for in that tweet is expenses. It's going to cost more than $11 billion to put on the Games.
In this tweet, Nick talks about the revenue share being bad. But what revenue does he think there is?
There's a reason why the DL meet is no longer in New York City - it was losing money.
Let's look at the Pre Classic. The meet attracts about 12,000 fans. If you say the average ticket price is $40 (which is generous as A LOT of the crowd is freebies, kids, etc), then that's $480,000 in revenue. Well guess what the meet pays out $450,000 in prize money.
But we're not even factoring in the costs of putting on the meet. Think about how much it costs to get all of the athletes to the meet and house them. I just looked at the Doha results. THere were 165 individuals listed in the results. If you give them all $1000 to get their, that's a lot of cash. Then you've got to pay the meet director, the security, pay for the stadium, etc.
A few years back, I helped secure the field for an elite mile in Ithaca. We paid out $20,000 just to have a mile with a few hundred fans. There was zero chance that would have happened without their being a huge corporate donation.
It's hard to make money without tv money and there isn't significant tv money in track. Think of it this way, minor league baseball players play hundreds of games with thousands of fans at every game and they make squat. Why? It's expensive to put events on .